Assessing the effectiveness of IEEE 802.11e in multi-hop mobile network environments

The IEEE 802.11e technology is receiving much interest due to the promising enhancements it offers to wireless local area networks in terms of QoS support. Until now, research has focused on single hop, access point based environments, which are the most common. We review the enhancements proposed in the last IEEE 802.11e draft (version 8.0). We analyze the performance of the IEEE 802.11e protocol on ad-hoc networks (multi-hop) in terms of throughput and end-to-end delay. We also measure the effectiveness for static and fully dynamic networks with a variable number of source stations. Finally, we analyze the performance of IEEE 802.11e when legacy IEEE 802.11 stations (no IEEE 802.11e support) are present in the network. Simulation results show that IEEE 802.11e does not lose effectiveness in multi-hop mobile environments, though the existence of legacy stations in the MANET provokes a severe performance drop.